Optical fibers have found an increased number of uses. As an example, modem communication systems incorporate optical fibers to take advantage of the available high bandwidth. In many systems, it is often necessary to splice optical fibers. Unfortunately, such splices sometimes fail during installation and during use. Locating and repairing a defective splice, which may be buried under ground or located within the walls of a building, can be very expensive. In order to prevent such costly repairs, optical fiber splices are routinely tested before installation and use.
A device for testing optical fiber splices is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,187,767. The disclosed device applies a force to opposite ends of a spliced optical fiber. The spliced optical fiber is retained on opposite sides of a splice by springs. One of the springs is slidable with respect to its base. A biased lever can be actuated to move the movable spring away from the other spring which applies tension to portions of the spliced optical fiber containing the splice. If the splice is defective, the user will observe a break in the splice by the fiber separating when the force is applied. Such pull testers may be effective when only a single fiber is being tested. However, such testers do not work well with multiple spliced fibers or ribbons which contain more than a single fiber and single splice. For example, if six splices are located next to each other and are tested with such a device, a failure in the splice of only one fiber will not cause a separation in the fiber group. It will only result in a proportional decrease in tension. Accordingly, the user may only observe a defect when more than one splice or a significant percentage of the splices is defective. Due to this phenomena, the effectiveness of such a tester will decrease as more spliced fibers are tested simultaneously.
Testers have been developed for testing splices used with optical fiber ribbons. Such testers apply a force to opposite ends of the ribbon while injecting light into the individual fibers. These testers require complicated and expensive light sources and detectors. Each optical fiber splice must be tested individually to ensure that none of them are defective. In addition to requiring expensive and complicated optics and electronics, tests performed with the prior art testers can be time consuming when each fiber optic cable is tested individually.
Accordingly, there exists a need in the art for an optical fiber splice tester which works with optical fiber ribbons and performs tests quickly without the need for expensive optical and electronic components.